Large enterprises with more than 1,000 employees are more likely to identify zero-trust policy implementation as a top cybersecurity challenge than smaller companies, which indicates a need for a simpler zero-trust management solution at scale, Perimeter 81 noted in a recent report.

The cloud and network security vendor surveyed 500 U.S. IT professionals in companies with more than 50 employees. It found that 14% of the respondents from larger companies (more than 1,000 employees) selected zero-trust policy implementation as the top five security challenges for 2021, while 8% of those from organizations with 50 to 499 employees made the same choice.

“Zero-trust implementation requires a radically simpler solution to allow all companies to benefit from its potential,” the report noted. “The larger the company, the more distributed the teams and complex the environment, so companies need a tool that can simplify and scale zero trust no matter their growth.”

“The best zero-trust tools should allow for easy deployment and be a fully-managed [Software-as-a-Service] solution so IT admins can focus on developing security policies, day-to-day monitoring, and threat responses,” researchers added.

Overall, the top five challenges respondents picked were data protection (67%), cloud security (65%), data privacy (60%), malware (45%), and ransomware and phishing (43%).

Perimeter 81 researchers zoomed into the data from those with concerns over data privacy and cloud security and found a majority of them had implementation plans for security services edge (SSE) elements that include firewall-as-a-service (FwaaS), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway, and Cloud Access Security Broker. The report showed that 22% of all respondents planned to implement ZTNA, while 50% of those who chose data privacy as the top challenge had plans, and 72% of respondents who found cloud security challenging had ZTNA deployment plans.

“We can see that secure service edge is a core priority,” the researchers wrote. “Companies are looking to SSE to solve their problems, and all elements are equally important in terms of achieving those goals.”

“Embracing principles including least-privileged access and continuous verification, a well-designed zero-trust strategy helps mitigate the damage that threat actors can do,” the researchers concluded.